Of all the combat encounters in BG3 EA, I think this is genuinely the most janky and tedious combat encounter in the game. It provides almost zero challenge and takes longer because of the awkward conditions of the encounter.
For those that don't remember, the Arcane Turrets are the stationary defenses posted outside the Cleric's Tower (a part of the mushroom collection quest and where you meet Bernard). The "flow" of these fights are an uniquely awkward and tedious experience.
Unlike any other enemies in the game, engaging the turrets does not trigger initiative/combat as the game doesn't really recognize them as enemies, but they will shoot at you the moment you get into range. This experience is especially janky because you have manage the pace of the fight yourself (i.e. enter the turn-base mode manually or do it in a weird real-time method), neither which are the game's strong suits for combat. This also causes extra control issues - i.e. because they're aren't even fully classified as enemies in the game, mousing over the arcane turrets does not automatically give you an attack command - you have to take the extra step to click attack/cantrip each time you want to make a move.
There is no challenge to this fight, aside from struggling with the control issues and tedium. The turrets are stationary and can only shoot at a straight line (with an indicator that tells you this) - you can guarantee a "perfect" victory using only cantrips or basic ranged attacks as long as you take the time to move in and out of cover in Turnbase mode.
So you end up with an encounter that genuine provides no challenge, is tedious to control, wastes the player's time, and doesn't affect your overall resource management or have any long term implications at all.
You can eventually disable many of these turrets by following through with the tower quest. But unless I am missing some very niche unique ways to sneak by them, you're basically guaranteed to waste time with a couple of them before you can keep moving with a generally far more interesting quest, and I'm not sure what they add from a gameplay perspective. Now, I think having a perimeter defense for this tower does makes sense for the worldbuilding and immersion - but there's no reason for the non-standard control. I genuinely hope Larian figures something out to make this encounter more interesting.
